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CU-Boulder helps bridge gap between academia and public

Programs, workshops aim for grad students to better share their research

By Sarah Kuta Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
12/01/2013 06:00:00 PM MST

Updated:
12/02/2013 04:46:19 PM MST

Over the lunch hour one Friday in November, 50 University of Colorado physics graduate students sat in a group, munching on pizza and holding bright yellow pieces of paper with the word JARGON typed in big block letters.

Susanna Kohler, who's studying astrophysics and science education at CU, explained her fictional research project to the group.

Whenever she came to a word the general public wouldn't understand, 50 yellow pieces of paper shot up into the air.

"This will help you when you go home and your family asks, 'So what is it that you do, again?'" Kohler said.

This hour-long event, designed to quickly provide CU physicists with tips for communicating more clearly, is part of a broader push at CU and campuses across the country to bridge the gap between graduate students and the general public.

As competition for university jobs and industry jobs -- jobs outside of academia -- grows stiffer, CU officials are trying to better prepare their graduate students with communication, teaching and other skills.

A recent National Science Foundation study found that the number of doctoral students with definite commitments for after graduation has been declining over the last decade. In 2011, the most recent data available in the study, 65.5 percent of doctoral students had job commitments, compared with 72.9 percent in 2001.

Perhaps equally important, CU officials want graduate students to share their findings and research with the general public to remind the community of the vital role the university plays in Boulder and the surrounding areas.

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"There is a national conversation that's been growing for three or four years about this as an issue that graduate schools should address," said John Stevenson, dean of CU's Graduate School. "It's especially urgent now as people are paying closer attention to higher education in general. Is higher education, in fact, delivering on the promises it's made to this country? It seems it's very important that our students not just here but everywhere learn not just how to be advanced researchers, but also how to share that work with other people.

University of Colorado junior Chris Carpenter, left, holds a cup of liquid nitrogen for Creekside Elementary School fifth-grader Zerrick Kellow to dip a flower in while learning about science Nov. 19 at Creekside in Boulder.
(
JEREMY PAPASSO
)

If people can't describe their work in ways that a larger public can understand, then people are going to say, 'Why should we support that?'"

A 'completely different language'

In November, Stevenson and the Graduate School hosted the first-ever dean's research grant symposium, in which students presented their research in front of a crowd to compete for grants ranging from $5,000 to $10,000.

Though communication skills weren't the deciding factor for who received grants, those students who were able to communicate their research clearly and efficiently had a definite advantage in the competition, Stevenson said.

Competition aside, communication skills will give them a leg up in the job market, too, Stevenson added.

"If you get a graduate student who can talk about their research to the broad public in a short time, three to five minutes, you can really get people excited about what's going on here, and that excitement is infectious," Stevenson said. "It's also something graduate students can feel an enormous additional sense of accomplishment about. Not only do they have great ideas, but they can talk about them."

CU's Graduate Teacher Program has been helping graduate students become more effective teachers since 1984. This year, director Laura Border started a new project in the program to help 10 graduate students from all disciplines -- French to anthropology to sociology -- expand upon their teaching abilities to talk to a broader audience.

"Obviously, you have to be interesting to teach in a classroom, but to talk to a public audience you have to use a completely different language," Border said.

In a public setting, Border said it's important for graduate students to help the audience members connect to the topic and make them understand why they should care.

On a topic like climate change, Border said researchers who work every day with the facts need to be able to communicate those ideas so the larger public makes informed decisions.

"It can have an impact on how people think and act and vote and live," Border said.

And when researchers talk to a general, non-expert audience, they're sometimes asked questions they hadn't considered before, said Noah Finkelstein, director of CU's Center for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) Learning.

Those types of questions force researchers to think creatively and deepen their own understanding of their research, he said.

"It's very easy for me to teach advanced physics students, but when I teach the physics for non-science majors course, I get the most fabulous, interesting questions," he said.

Students in the non-science majors course, Finkelstein said, might ask something like: If light slows down when it enters glass, where do we get the energy to speed it up again when it leaves?

"In my physics majors course, I can say we use an equation," Finkelstein said. "But then how do you explain that to someone conceptually? We can hold ourselves accountable by having multiple modalities for understanding and explaining a physics phenomenon. We can do the math. We can do discussions with peers in journal publications. But that's incomplete. It augments our collective understanding about the nature of science and scientific practice itself."

Universities must 'export the knowledge'

While researching his dissertation on the connections between poetry and chemistry during the Romantic period, Kurtis Hessel learned that during that era, universities regularly put on community lecture series.

"It was a fashionable thing for wealthy Londoners to go see a lecture, and seeing that in my research, I find it an exciting, much less structured, maybe more vital way to communicate knowledge to a wider audience," Hessel said. "I would love to see graduate students from a variety of disciplines within the university going out and performing public lectures."

Public lectures would help graduate students diversify their lives and help keep them from getting "trapped" in their research, Hessel said.

They would also remind the public of the good that universities bring to the community and to the world at large.

"What would be the point of the university if it wasn't to export the knowledge that was produced within?" Hessel said. "Otherwise it would just be this place where knowledge goes to get packaged up into boxes and stored away. That's not the university that I would like. The university I would hope for is one where people are doing vibrant research but they're also committed to taking that research and repackaging it and redistributing it to the broader populous."

'Science is for everybody'

One of the researchers leading the JARGON lunch discussion for CU physics graduate students, Katie Hinko, has dedicated her post-doctoral research to studying the effects of community partnerships between K-12 students and graduate students.

As director for CU's Partnerships for Informal Science Education in the Community, Hinko and a team of about 25 volunteer graduate students head to local elementary schools and community centers several times a week for free, after-school programming in science.

In her research, Hinko studies how the program helps K-12 students think of science as part of their identity, and also the impact on the researchers who are learning through the program to break down complicated science topics for young minds, she said.

"They are able to practice and get better at communicating about science with non-experts," she said. "They work with kids who give this immediate and unfiltered feedback, so if you are trying to work with kids about reflections and you start using words like 'angle of incidence,' they will not pay attention to you. You get all this practice coming up with ways to talk to people and come to understanding together about a topic."

In addition to practicing communication skills, the graduate student volunteers also can have an affect on whether the kids view science in a positive way. Programs like CU's can help bring diversity to the research community, Hinko said, because the program might reach "hidden" populations who wouldn't have otherwise viewed science positively or as part of their identity.

If graduate students in all disciplines, including science, can't communicate effectively, it sends a message to the public that education and knowledge aren't meant for them. And that's just not true, said Finkelstein.

"Very quickly, it's like the Charlie Brown skit, 'Wah wah wah electron,' and then people hear, 'Wah wah wah science,' and then they hear 'not for me' and 'not interested,'" he said. "That's precisely incorrect. Science is for everybody. Science is fascinating. It's interesting. It makes our own lives better. It makes our society better, and everyone should have access."

University of Colorado senior Eric Miller, at right, works with Creekside Elementary School third-graders Lucas Waitman, at center, and Tobias Beesley while making short movies together on Tuesday, Nov. 19, at Creekside Elementary School in Boulder. (JEREMY PAPASSO)

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